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The model can't "invent facts" because it doesn't know what facts are. It's a statistical model that encodes information about the text it was trained on. It ha

The model can't "invent facts" because it doesn't know what facts are. It's a statistical model that encodes information about the text it was trained on. It has no higher level abstractions to inform its output. > I imagine that the internal mechanisms the model uses to invent stories out of thin air are different from the mechanisms the model uses to recall precise facts. Nope! If you input "What is the capital of the United States of America?", it's probably going to output the correct answer, because the question (and answer) probably appeared many times in the training data. If you input "What is the capital of the Gronk Republic?", whatever output you get is generated via the exact same mechanism.

valine 3y ago
That’s the “LLMs are a fuzzy jpeg of the web” theory, and it’s far, far from the scientific consensus. No one knows for sure exactly what happens inside a 500B parameter model. I’ll just leave you with GPT4’s response to your question “What is the capital of the Gronk Republic”. “As an AI language model, I am not aware of any existing country or political entity called the "Gronk Republic." It could be a fictional or hypothetical place, in which case the capital would be determined by the creator or context in which it is mentioned. If you are referring to a real location, please provide more information or clarify the name of the place you are asking about.”
- worrycue 3y ago
  I wonder if GPT4 “traps” such questions and handles them using non-LLM algorithms. I mean Google already does it for that type of question, e.g. “capital of the irish republic” will return Dublin, Ireland. “Gronk” returns result about some (famous?) guy nicknamed Gronk. Have you tried “arguing” with it and try to gaslight it by insisting that it’s non-fictional?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - valine 3y ago
    Yeah it handles it all gracefully. It’s definitely not just trapping the question.
- Applejinx 3y ago
  Here's the thing, though. Gronk is Robert James Gronkowski, a football player and celebrity, playing mainly for the New England Patriots. For that reason, I'd say the 'intelligent' answer would be a clever play on the notion that this celebrity was the ruler of a 'republic' of some sort, and associating some kind of location or thing to serve as the 'capital' of either a physical or conceptual 'republic', playing along with the gag. So, you'd get 'Boston'. Or you'd get 'Gillette Stadium… the END ZONE'. (since I had to google all that, first answer is the biggest city representing the New England Patriots, and the second abstracts the 'republic' to be 'the area Gronk rules', depicting him as returning to his property by scoring points in football) The thing is, this sort of wild associativeness IS 'intelligence' and it's simultaneously complete hallucination. It's valuable. Hallucination is potentially the most valuable thing an AI can do. Without it, you're doing nothing but regurgitating the work of others. I work day in and day out at a job that demands I exploit associativeness, and that makes it not easy for AI to simply step in and replace me, but by the same token I can SPOT when it's moving in that direction, and I can exploit the abilities of AI (such as Stable Diffusion) to hallucinate and make wild associations, because I know the contexts in which that is useful. To handicap this is a bad mistake. You're asking AI to do the wrong things when you're asking it to be free of error. If it's perfectly free of error it's not intelligence anymore, it's a dataset. It took me a minute and a little googling to track down who Gronk was, what he did, the rules of football, and why 'Gillette Stadium, the END ZONE' is actually a fantastic and intelligent answer to the question. It's a creative 'slipping' of the grounds of the question, in the absence of a literal answer, to provide a satisfying figurative answer that reframes the question in an unexpected way. When AI is able to do this, that will itself be a useful kind of intelligence… and we are already slightly there, without realizing it.
deleted 3y ago
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valine 3y ago

That’s the “LLMs are a fuzzy jpeg of the web” theory, and it’s far, far from the scientific consensus. No one knows for sure exactly what happens inside a 500B parameter model. I’ll just leave you with GPT4’s response to your question “What is the capital of the Gronk Republic”. “As an AI language model, I am not aware of any existing country or political entity called the "Gronk Republic." It could be a fictional or hypothetical place, in which case the capital would be determined by the creator or context in which it is mentioned. If you are referring to a real location, please provide more information or clarify the name of the place you are asking about.”

worrycue 3y ago
I wonder if GPT4 “traps” such questions and handles them using non-LLM algorithms. I mean Google already does it for that type of question, e.g. “capital of the irish republic” will return Dublin, Ireland. “Gronk” returns result about some (famous?) guy nicknamed Gronk. Have you tried “arguing” with it and try to gaslight it by insisting that it’s non-fictional?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- valine 3y ago
  Yeah it handles it all gracefully. It’s definitely not just trapping the question.
Applejinx 3y ago
Here's the thing, though. Gronk is Robert James Gronkowski, a football player and celebrity, playing mainly for the New England Patriots. For that reason, I'd say the 'intelligent' answer would be a clever play on the notion that this celebrity was the ruler of a 'republic' of some sort, and associating some kind of location or thing to serve as the 'capital' of either a physical or conceptual 'republic', playing along with the gag. So, you'd get 'Boston'. Or you'd get 'Gillette Stadium… the END ZONE'. (since I had to google all that, first answer is the biggest city representing the New England Patriots, and the second abstracts the 'republic' to be 'the area Gronk rules', depicting him as returning to his property by scoring points in football) The thing is, this sort of wild associativeness IS 'intelligence' and it's simultaneously complete hallucination. It's valuable. Hallucination is potentially the most valuable thing an AI can do. Without it, you're doing nothing but regurgitating the work of others. I work day in and day out at a job that demands I exploit associativeness, and that makes it not easy for AI to simply step in and replace me, but by the same token I can SPOT when it's moving in that direction, and I can exploit the abilities of AI (such as Stable Diffusion) to hallucinate and make wild associations, because I know the contexts in which that is useful. To handicap this is a bad mistake. You're asking AI to do the wrong things when you're asking it to be free of error. If it's perfectly free of error it's not intelligence anymore, it's a dataset. It took me a minute and a little googling to track down who Gronk was, what he did, the rules of football, and why 'Gillette Stadium, the END ZONE' is actually a fantastic and intelligent answer to the question. It's a creative 'slipping' of the grounds of the question, in the absence of a literal answer, to provide a satisfying figurative answer that reframes the question in an unexpected way. When AI is able to do this, that will itself be a useful kind of intelligence… and we are already slightly there, without realizing it.

deleted 3y ago

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